


Yet certain am I of the spot

by Naraht



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Immortality, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully: "All right. So how do I die?"<br/>Bruckman: "You don't."<br/>--<i>Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Yet certain am I of the spot

"I never spoke with God  
Nor visited in Heaven  
Yet certain am I of the spot  
As if the Checks were given."

\--Emily Dickinson

In the many lifetimes granted to me, I've tried to make myself worthy of this gift I've been given. I've worked, and studied, and travelled, and learned. It would be hubris to think that I've answered every question and found every truth that is buried in the infinite depths of the universe. Still, I've come as close as any living woman can come to looking into the face of God. Once, a long time ago, I would have said "any mortal woman," but I'm not that. Not anymore.

"You can never have too much life," I said once, to a man who thought he knew otherwise. Endless life. The prospects of endless knowledge. It should have been a Faustian bargain; I should have had to sell my soul to get it. Yet if it is, if I did, I haven't felt it. And I'm not ready for death. Not quite yet.

Aliens exist. Not only do they exist, they thrive, spread out across the galaxy in civilizations of which we humans could only have dreamt when we began to make our way into space millennia ago. They've showed me more than I could ever have imagined, methane rain and the decay of neutron stars and the fractal filigree of life on worlds where humans have never stepped. All of it is true. I feel not even a brush of the chagrin that once would have touched me at the admission. Mulder would be in heaven.

I only wish that I could tell him. Sometimes I conjure him up in my mind, just so I can imagine showing him all I've discovered, as if existence is a case that I'm just about to solve. Yet his voice is weak in my mind, and I am so far beyond him now that in my visions Mulder becomes a skeptic, unable to accept or understand the wonders that I take for granted. So I retreat from the dream, bury myself in the cold, stark, reassuring ways of nature, unfolding in cycles so vast and slow that beside them I am newborn by comparison.

"You live forever," said Fellig, "sooner or later you start to think about the big thing you're missing and that everybody else gets to find out about but you." Every so often, in the early years, as the people I had loved slipped away from me into a place where I couldn't follow, I would wish that I could follow, and then reproach myself for my weakness, just as I would reproach a potential suicide who stood poised on the brink. _You have work to do,_ I would tell myself, and I still believe it. Yet eventually I will realize that he was right.

When the search for knowledge begins to pall, as all things do in time, I know that my thoughts will turn to the part of me that I lost when I closed my eyes for what I thought was the last time, lying on the dingy floor of an apartment in New York City. "Do you see him? Do you see him?" Fellig asked, as I slid into the hazy embrace of death. "Don't look. Close your eyes." And my eyelids fluttered closed, and I missed him forever, whoever he was. Death, or an angel of God. In bringing me eternal life, that moment deprived me of something essential, the inheritance of mortality that is the birthright of every human being.

As surely as I have inherited the universe, Mulder has inherited the kingdom of heaven. Mulder, and my mother, and Melissa, and all the people that I once knew and loved, are ineffably distant from me now. So is the Catholic faith in which I was raised an eternity ago.The small gold cross that I used to wear on a chain around my neck has long ago worn away to dust, and on a galactic scale the very idea seems ridiculous. A savior who is said to have visited only one small planet, a drop of rain in the deluge of existence. And yet, and yet...

Every once in a while, I do wonder. In gaining the immortality of the body and the mind, did I sacrifice the chance to learn whether I also possessed an immortal soul? Or did I, perhaps, sell it after all?


End file.
